This JavaScript alert box is admissible in court

Most people have seen stupid "copy protection" on Web pages, where some message about copyright or something pops up when you click the right mouse button. This is supposed to stop you from wickedly making another copy of some portion of the data that has already been stored on your own hard drive when your Web browser asked the server for the page, and the server cheerfully sent it.

(See also, people who make Web sites and then demand that you not link to them.)

Via The Daily WTF's most recent instalment of Error'd, though, comes what may be the Greatest BS Right-Click Warning Ever:

Ridiculous right-click warning

Every listing from this seller has this. Just scroll down to the main product description and click your wicked pirate terrorist right mouse button somewhere on it, and you will immediately receive your very own copy of this fascinating alert box.

Right-click over and over! Send dozens of "reports"! Wheeee!

In case you're new to all this, and wondering: No, nothing's actually being "recorded" or "reported". The alert is created by a little snippet of JavaScript that tells the browser to do something when you release the second mouse button. In this case, the code pops up the alert with the stupid message.

It works in the same way as this, which also pops up an alert when you click on it. (It's also not unlike the system used for "security" by the subjects of another Daily WTF story.)

Unless you've got JavaScript disabled, that is, in which case it won't do anything at all.

If you throw caution to the wind and view the source of any of this eBay seller's item pages - using that advanced hacker tool, your browser's "View" menu, or perhaps just by right-clicking somewhere else on the page from the main product description - you'll see that the high-powered enterprise-computing code that creates this very serious warning is part of a rather long single line.

As entertained DailyWTF commenters have observed, that line is, in the case of the listing I looked at anyway, a magnificent 40,076 characters in length.

Some text editors will choke on lines longer than 32,768 characters, you know.

So that's even more security, right there!

Have you ever SEEN an atom split?

The other day, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. This gave various news organisations the chance to remind us all that if you ask the man in the street if he believes there was ever a man on the moon, there's a discouragingly decent chance that he'll tell you he doesn't.

The new pictures won't make any impact on the conspiracy theorists. You could bundle them into a flying saucer, fly them to the moon, and hover 10 feet above the footprints and Apollo descent stages, and they'd say you obviously must have come there in that same saucer half an hour ago and set all this stuff up. I mean, it's been 40 years and the footprints haven't even blown away yet! How dumb do you think we are, man!

Clearly, the only way we're going to stop hearing from these people is if we give them something to talk about which they find more exciting. Ideally, I'd like them to become convinced that this supposed "moon" doesn't actually existd at all, but I think that'd be a tough sell. If we guide them carefully, though, we may still be able to make the next We-Never-Actually-Did-X conspiracy theory much more entertaining than the unutterably depressing moon-hoax one.

How about this, then:

We never split the atom. The Manhattan Project was a fake.

Or it was real, but it was actually a collaborative research project between the US Government, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and the reptilian cabal that really ruled both Britain and Nazi Germany. Under the cover of so-called "atomic" research, this covert "xenofascist" project developed the occult death-from-a-distance technology that was what really killed Kennedy, when he was planning to spill the beans on that disappearing destroyer.

This, naturally, means that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hit by atomic bombs. It's possible that there was actually a huge conventional bombing program using giant pyramidal strategic bombers, flying from their bases just inside the South Phantom Pole, and given almost unlimited range and maneuverability by the use of a hybrid orgone/Vril fuel source, with antigravity lifters for propulsion. It's clearly more likely, however, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events were actually the result of an earth-penetrating electrical seismic concentrator, based on Nikola Tesla's well-known power-broadcast and earthquake machines.

Tesla refused to help the xenofascists combine his technologies, which is why they had him killed in 1943. If he had helped, the earthquake gun would presumably have avoided the embarrassing misfire on its first activation. That shot missed not only by 3,900 kilometres in distance, but also by some 37 years in time, and caused the Tunguska event.

(So Tesla and Tunguska are connected - just not in the way everybody thinks!)

Where was I? Oh, yes.

"Nuclear power" is actually produced by means of black magic, but it's hard to tell exactly which kind, on account of the Malicious Animal Magnetism that so horribly destroys anybody who looks inside one of the "reactor vessels". This explains why the original promises that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter came to nothing; it turns out that the sheer quantities of alchemical ingredients, large animals, human blood and, of course, babies you need to keep the Old Things from escaping a "nuclear" power plant make such plants very expensive to run.

Oh, and "nuclear medicine" is also a hoax. The supposed "shielding" around "radioactive" items is just more camouflage for sacred geometries and resonant crystals.

And as for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has the word "nuclear" in its name and so must have to do with radiation and atoms splitting and stuff, those supposed "superconducting magnets" do have liquid nitrogen in them, but it's just to stop anybody from using a hacksaw to discover what the device actually contains. Inside, there are actually carefully broken-in audiophile-grade power cables, wrapped in a helix to match human ethereal DNA, and all running from a single button cell covered with so many battery-boosting stickers that it could power a small town.

Right. All we need to do now is boil this down into a bumper sticker.

The ATO is mother, the ATO is father

If you go the Australian Taxation Office's security-certificate-renewal page, and choose not to trust their own certificate, they send you to this page:

Trust the ATO!

I chose not to trust 'em quite a while ago, actually. I suppose it was inevitable that they'd cotton on eventually.

Posted in Humour. 4 Comments »

April Fools roundup

Since I've once again failed to come up with an idea for an April Fools article - I really have, this isn't me trying to sneakily slip one past you - I shall list neat ones I notice today in this post.

Trossen Robotics had the first joke I noticed today, with their revolutionary Keepon USB.

The only one that's really grabbed me so far, though, is Hexus.net alerting us all to a new "dead-pixel pandemic", nicely done with a ton of class="deadPixel" DIVs instead of the lame background image I would have used if I'd thought of it.

Other neat jokes I notice will be added to the post here:

1: Pre-eminent zombie-apocalypse browser-game Urban Dead has a corker; I think you see it the first time you re-visit Urban Dead after the start of the 1st.

Basically, everything is back to normal and it was all just a horrible dream.

2: Famous hive of scum and villainy eztv.it is currently redirecting to ezsports.tv - "Your source for the best sports!"

3: Gmail AutopilotTM.

4: Retro Thing Ceases Publication of Color Edition.

5: Winner of the "most highbrow" award - "Time variation of a fundamental dimensionless constant".

6: A series of joke woodworking items from Lee Valley, some more obviously preposterous than others:

Variable Gang Saw
Full-Round Spokeshave
Honing Guide Mk.XXXXII
Pouchless Tool Belt
Dodeca-Gauge
Low-Angle Jack Plane

They have a distinct Chindogu aspect to them, and are very well done.

(Feel free to point out any good ones you've found in the comments!)

Slashdot always do an online-jokes roundup article in addition to their annual front-page-of-nonsense-and-unicorns, but it of course isn't quite time for that yet, since it's still March 31st in the States - actually, as I write this, it's just barely April 1st on the East Coast of the USA. It's already the afternoon of April the 1st here in Australia, though.

There are a few April-Fools-type articles (not all of which were actually published on the appropriate day) on dansdata.com. My favourites are the kitten review and my campaign to Save The Unsecured Access Points.

Dig back, though, and there's the one that gave this blog its name, "Black Computers Faster - It's Official", "U.S. Marine Corps announces new 'Geek Corps'", the New Intel "Sextium" processor, and that picture of me wearing the Errorwear Guru Meditation shirt back in October 2001:

Guru Meditation T-shirt

(You could probably make a shirt that actually did that, now.)

And then there's the EMPower Modulator, Wine Clip, Batterylife Activator, Guardian Angel battery and so on which, like the Firepower pills, ought to be jokes, but aren't.

Goody goody GIF GIF

There are several things I should be writing now.

Instead, I made this.

Graeme Garden the film director

This is Graeme Garden (recently the voice of the demonic Mr Bibby in Bromwell High) being a film director, in "The Making of The Goodies' Disaster Movie", published in 1977. For Christmas, my sister got me my very own copy.

When I was a kid, a significant amount of my interest in (my uncle's copy of) this large but slim volume stemmed from the fact that it has some boobies in it. But it actually still stands up perfectly well today. The more dated a joke in it is, the more historically interesting it's likely to be. (Take, for instance, the running gag about Keith Moon's boundless destructive power; Moon died the year after the book came out. There's also a lot of jokes about surgical supports; improved hernia treatment techniques mean almost nobody has to wear a truss any more.)

Back in the Seventies, The Goodies was overshadowed by Monty Python's Flying Circus almost everywhere (various Pythons and Goodies have collaborated in other projects), but here in Australia the show developed a huge following. This was because although The Goodies is immensely silly, it is also actually a show for grown-ups. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation put it to air, almost completely uncensored, in an after-school time slot. There were endless re-runs of the show on the ABC in the Eighties, surprising and delighting the young audience, who got to see risqué jokes and lots of violence. (For much the same reason, the Monkey TV series is also tremendously popular among Australians approaching middle age.)

You can now get some Goodies on DVD, too. They're not necessarily going to be exactly your cup of tea if you weren't raised on them (see also: Vegemite), but there are a few episodes that really are just brilliant. Like, for instance, "It Might As Well Be String":

(There's more info about the surprisingly large number of Goodies books here.)

Another voter heard from

From: ron <starrwulf@yahoo.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: website
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:44:53 -0700 (PDT)

[Quoted from my first magnet review:]
The earth's natural magnetic field is about 0.5G, depending on where you are - it's weaker at the equator and stronger at the poles. It's also slowly declining at the moment, which is something that it does periodically; geological evidence shows that it's actually reversed several times over the planet's life. The mental giants at the Institute for Creation Research use the decline of the field strength to prove that the planet's only a few thousand years old.
In case you're wondering, this, like various other of their proofs, doesn't stand up too well.

;;;perhaps if you had listened to the explaination instead of hiding behind your evolution, the science of it would have made sense to you. Dr. Carl Baugh or Ken Hovind [Links mine! All spelling Ron's!] do a good job of explaining the science of it and other things the so called 'mental giants' of evolution ignore or deny out of hand. sorry to see your science falls short of what true science is suppose to be.

otherwise, your site is informative for the little i have read of it... between your evolution and earth magnetics belief, i am surprised you dont believe in perpetual motion, too.

I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?

(Just in case some other green-ink-and-underlining correspondent is all het up about me linking to searches of infidels.org and talkorigins.org in the above quote, here's what the homosexual Satanists of Wikipedia have to say about Carl and Kent. {Apparently his friends call him Ken. Who knew?})

But what if it gets sunburn?

Presented as received, emphasis theirs:

From: "rachel" <rachel@infronts.com>>
To: <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject:
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 01:39:08 +0800

Dear Dan,

Have a nice day£¡

I am happy to present hot selling items for you reference. A lot of clients are interesting in this item, so I try to send them for your reference. Hope it is helpful for you!

Here is our Solar USB Dick for your reference,hope you are interexted in.

Feature:Animation Display
Operating sysrem:Windows 98/SE, Windows ME, 2000 XP and Mac OS9.1
Drivers: Only Windows 98/SE need the driver

Logo is made by Pc software and displayed on LCD screen, when there is light logo blink thus to attract people's attention.

[blah blah blah, picture of USB thumb-drives with a solar-powered capacity-display thing on the side]

Pirce: FOB shenzhen

500PCS
128MB USD3.15
256MB USD3.45
512MB USD3.75
1GB USD4.25
2GB USD4.65
4GB USD7.60

MOQ:500pcs , More qty will be more cheaper.
Product material: Plastic Housing
Product size: 62*25*13mm
Packing: each in a color box,100pcs/48*36*29cm; G.W./N.W.:12.5*11.7

This offer is firm for 1 week.
Please add USD0.30 for ROHS.
Printing logo: logo set up charge: USD100.00/design.
Sample delivery time is 3-5 day after order confirm.
Delivery time: 7-10 day after sample approval.

Should any of the items be of interest to you, please let us know. We shall be glad to give you our lowest quotations upon receipt of your detailed requirement.

Rachel
IFS electronice company limited

Web:www.infronts.com

Solar dick!

Yep, that's an electronice solar dick all right.

(I bet they'll print whatever famous computer-product-company logo you like on your 500 solar dicks.)

Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

I was aware of the existence of Tim Minchin, a musician who could be making nothing but finely crafted terribly earnest heartfelt ballads, but who is unable to resist the urge to just crack a few jokes.

I was unaware, however, of his unfashionable belief in the existence of empirical reality.

This one's audio-only:

And man, have I ever been there.

Ideally, you've got someone like Tim on hand so you can tag him in when you need to go out for a little walk after being told about the Muslim Mafia that's breaking like a swarthy tsunami over the civilised world, or whatever.

If your tag-team comrade can bust mad rhymes, so much the better.

(Tim's YouTube channel.)